Meet Sen. Norm Slimy (R-MN)

Although I’ve lived in Toronto for going-on two decades, Minnesota was my last state of residence in the US so it is where I’ve voted since moving here. Reading on-line editions of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press coupled with having friends – some since high school – who still live there, it’s easy for me to keep up with home state politics.

In a state known for squeaky clean, Lake Woebegon-like politics, Sen. Norm Coleman is the poster child of slimy political stunts, self-serving manoeuvring and kow-towing to corporate campaign donors.

He was narrowly elected to the Senate in 2002 after incumbent Democrat Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash during the campaign – a sad irony because Wellstone was first elected in 1996 barnstorming the state in an battered, old, school bus painted green. Now, Coleman is embroiled in a state-mandated recount because the election results in his fight against Al Franken fell within 0.5% of a tie.

How slimy is Coleman?

Besides demanding that Franken forego the recount even though precious few votes separate them and the law requires it, Coleman and his surrogates are attacking everyone from poll workers to Minnesota’s Secretary of State Mark Ritchie with lies about vote count shenanigans, being untrustworthy and practically criminal behaviour. When Republican lies are disproven – sometimes by the very people who started them – Coleman conveniently ignores reality and goes on with his smears.

Well, what can you expect? Coleman was first approached about running for the Senate by Karl Rove.

Typical Coleman Crappola

This week on The Rachel Maddow Show, Ritchie fired back at the Senator. He noted that, as the elected Secretary of State, it is his job to take the jabs and smears “but Sen. Coleman has no business attacking the integrity of election judges around the state, many of whom have been volunteering for decades without a hint of wrongdoing or impropriety.”

Now Coleman and the national Republican Party are flying in some 100 GOP lawyers to peek over the volunteer’s shoulders as Minnesota’s 87 counties recount the Senate vote. But while much of the nation is aghast at what Coleman is doing, for people in Minnesota his smarmy representation is nothing new.

For example, in March 2007, Coleman introduced legislation to kill the Defense Travel System, a program to automate Defense Dept. travel purchases, which spends roughly $5.5-billion annually for travel. Shortly after filing the legislation, Coleman received a generous contribution from CEO Marilyn Carlson Nelson of Minneapolis-based Carlson Companies, owner of Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Its Government Travel unit provides lucrative services for numerous federal agencies. Moreover, over the years, Coleman has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from other Carlson Companies executives.

As a constituent, I wrote objecting to his measure to bring efficiency to travel purchases by the federal government. Weeks later, a form letter showed up in my e-mail saying, in effect, go stuff yourself.

He backed Pres. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, telling me in a letter I wrote to him at the time objecting to the scheme that Americans can better take care of their future than the government. As the stock market crash amply demonstrated, had Social Security been privatized as Coleman wanted, the nation’s elderly would be even worse off now than they are.

He told me in another letter that the Patriot Act is an important way to protect Americans from terrorism, saying that people not involved in nefarious activities have nothing to worry about. Uhm, it turns out we all have a lot to worry about as Attorney General Michael Mukasey proved again a few weeks ago by allowing FBI agents to investigate anyone for any reason.

Smart Money

I stopped writing to Sen. Coleman once I realised all I was receiving in return were Republican talking points, the same ones The White House shares with Fox News every day. By comparison, when I write to my other senator, Amy Klobuchar, I receive a thoughtful reply that includes a rationale for her position. I don’t always agree with her but at least she explains why she is supporting or opposing some piece of legislation.

Coleman merely spits in my face.

Friends in Minnesota tell me that the smart money in the recount is on Franken who carried the urban Hennepin and Ramsey counties and their surrounding suburbs by wide margins as well as counties in the traditionally heavy Democratic-voting Iron Range which includes Duluth. The state and the US Senate would be well-served by ridding itself of another self-serving toady who, in his own quiet way, is turning into the Ted Stevens of the Midwest.

Bloomberg Sues The Fed For Loan Disclosure

Lost in the wake of Henry Paulson’s announcement Wednesday that Treasury is “changing direction” in how it doles out money in the bank rescue plan is a little-noticed lawsuit filed last Friday by Bloomberg LP, the business news wire service. It is suing the Federal Reserve Board’s governors for public records that would answer two simple questions: Who is receiving $2-trillion in Fed loans and what collateral are taxpayers getting to support them?

That’s trillion, with a “t.”

And, yes, as hard as it is to believe, taxpayers don’t know the identity of the borrowers to whom they are lending. They also don’t know what kind of junk — Stocks? Bonds? Three milk cows and a ’69 Camaro? — they are getting to collateralize the federal loans.

As Bloomberg wrote Monday, “The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.”

Unbelievable.

Listen, one can argue about whether the Fed’s loan program is wise or not though most people think it is.

But now that the Treasury’s vaults have been thrown open, taxpayers have a right to know who is getting the loans. Likewise, taxpayers should know the collateral being held, especially given the virtual certainty it is worth far less than the cash they are lending. Taxpayer exposure is enormous.

Loans Worth $2-Trillion

The $2-trillion in loans that are the subject of its suit are separate and apart from the $700-billion rescue package passed by Congress in October. At least, that law has some measure of transparency — we know which banks are getting capital — and safeguards to ensure that taxpayers’ investment is secured.

The Fed lending program is different. As the Bloomberg suit explains, before August 2007 the Fed typically loaned money to regular banks for very short periods of time requiring gold-leaf collateral and had about $1-million in loans outstanding at any one time. Come the financial crisis, the Fed added three new lending programs and dramatically eased terms and dropped collateral standards, opening the loan spigot. By the first week of October, the Fed had average lending of more than $400-billion. Now, the figure is much higher.

Almost daily, the Money Honeys on CNBC announce that such numbers are unprecedented, and it is all too true.

In return, banks handed over collateral of unknown and, assumedly, poor quality. The gap between amount loaned and the amount the collateral is worth is the amount the taxpayers may have to pay if banks can’t make good on these loans.

Seeks Basic Information

The Bloomberg suit is looking for very basic the information:

The government documents that Bloomberg seeks are central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression. The effect of that crisis on the American public has been and will continue to be devastating. Hundreds of corporations are announcing layoffs in response to the crisis and the economy was the top issue for many Americans in the recent elections …

In response to the crisis, the Fed has vastly expanded its lending programs to private financial institutions. To obtain access to the public money and to safeguard the taxpayers’ interests, borrowers are required to post collateral. Despite the manifest public interest in such matters, however, none of the programs themselves make reference to any public disclosure of the posted collateral or of the Fed’s methods of valuing it. Thus, while the taxpayers are the ultimate counterparty for the collateral, they have not been given any information regarding the kind of collateral received, how it was valued, or by whom.

Seems pretty clear to me. The documents Bloomberg request are all pretty basic stuff.

Records to sufficient to show the names of the Relevant Securities.

Records sufficient to show the amount of borrowing permitted as compared to the face value [the non-marked-down value of the collateral], also known as the ‘haircut…’

Records sufficient to describe whether valuations or ‘haircuts’ for the Relevant Securities changed over time [i.e. whether taxpayer losses are growing]…

Records sufficient to show the terms of the loans and the rates that the borrowers must pay…

Records, including contracts with outside entities, that show the employees or entities being used to price the relevant securities and to conduct the lending process.

Who’s running the program? A simple question.

Unneeded Secrecy

There are arguments against disclosure, of course, but the secrecy case here seems especially weak.

Banks oppose any release of information because it might signal weakness and spur short-selling or a run by depositors, said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group.

Barney Frank gives it a try and comes across sounding foolish which Rep. Frank is not: “I talk to [New York Fed Chairman Tim] Geithner and he was pretty sure that they’re OK. If the risk is that the Fed takes a little bit of a haircut, well that’s regrettable.” Such losses would be acceptable, he said, if the program helps revive the economy.

Pretty sure they’re okay? Sorry, Barney, that’s just not enough. And then he makes an equally weak case for secrecy.

Frank said the Fed shouldn’t reveal the assets it holds or how it values them because of “delicacy with respect to pricing.” He said such disclosure would “give people clues to what your pricing is and what they might be able to sell us and what your estimates are.” He wouldn’t say why he thought that information would be sticky.

Actually, it’s more likely that visibility would help the market, as Bloomberg’s story points out:

Revealing how the Fed values collateral could help thaw frozen credit markets, said Ron D’Vari, chief executive officer of NewOak Capital LLC in New York and the former head of structured finance at BlackRock Inc.

“I’d love to hear the methodology, how the Fed priced the assets,” D’Vari said. “That would unclog the market very quickly.”

Misplaced Fear

The fear for banks is misplaced. They already have the loans, so they’re fine. The real purpose of secrecy is hiding how badly taxpayers are in the hole. As the Bloomberg suit points out:

The public has significant and legitimate interest in the Fed’s conduct with respect for these four lending facilities because the Fed’s assets are public assets. Taxpayers are entitled to understand and assets the decisions by the Fed on the valuation of the collateral it accepts as security for public money being lent to private institutions. The public’s interest is particularly pronounced in light of the new expansive powers of the Fed, the new risks that the Fed is taking with public money, and the ongoing financial crisis and its effects on the American economy.

As the public’s independent eyes and ears on the government, news organizations, can do no less than everything in their power to put a spotlight on these public expenditures. The power to tax and spend is probably government’s most basic one. To me, watching those is a news organization’s first order of business: It is Job One.

Freedom of Information Act requests are a common newsgathering tool and so are lawsuits to force disclosure when the law is violated. The Bloomberg suit is a reasonable, appropriate and measured tactic by a mainstream news organization. And the suit is manifestly in the public interest.

News organizations compete but they usually cooperate on matters of press freedom and transparency. This is one of those times.

Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, The New York Times, CNBC and every other print and broadcast media that purports to cover business news to join the Bloomberg suit.

Remembering Veterans …

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada - what America calls Veterans Day - and everything except retailing and restaurants shuts down tight across the country, even in Québec.

Canada treats Remembrance Day observations much more somberly than do US celebrations. This may well be the result of how the British mercilessly used the colonial Canadian army as fodder in both World Wars and the US seems to view Veterans Day mostly as time for a one-day-only sale.

Also, I suspect Remembrance Day is such a somber commemoration in Canada not just because the country has had peacekeepers on constant active duty in various places around the world for as long as any Canadian alive can remember, but because one in 275 Canadians died in World War II, one in 100 in The Great War. Since half the population was female and a significant share of the men were either too old or young, two entire generations of men in this country were wiped out. Twice.

In World War I, British commanders like Gen. Kitchener sent Canadian troops over the top first and units were usually assigned impossible tasks such as taking and holding Vimy Ridge. Tens of thousands of Canadians died in a few days of fighting while the Brits stayed the flanks and took very little German fire. But Canadians held the ridge.

It was much the same thing in World War II.

When Winston Churchill decided to try a poorly planned mini-invasion of France way before D-Day, Lord Louis Mountbatten send a nearly all-Canadian force to Dieppe. Ill-considered, ill-trained, ill-equipped and ill-led by the British, almost everyone was either killed or captured, and those who returned to England suffered hideous wounds and injuries.

During the Italian campaign, Field Marshall Montgomery used Canadian troops to take the brunt of German resistance in the middle of the country as the British army fought its way up the relatively soft east coast of Italy.

Likewise, during and after D-Day: Canadians were first assigned to fight their way through the hardest of German reinforcements at Normandy and, later, sent alone to rout Germans during the Battle of the Veldt in the Low Countries.

On the other hand, the Dutch have been forever grateful to Canada for liberating their country.

It is Canada - not Britain or America - that holds a special place in Dutch hearts. The tulip gardens in front of Parliament in Ottawa are a thank you from the Netherlands for liberating the nation. Holland may be the only place on earth where Canadians hide the flag most of them have on their luggage. While elsewhere in the world the flag will bring a smile, a welcome or an open door, in Amsterdam a Canadian can hardly negotiate the handshakes and hugs from strangers when they walk down the street.

On a number of occasions over the years, I've been in bars in Holland where a friendly local happened to ask where I was from. When I answered Toronto, patrons wouldn't let me pay for a drink the rest of the evening.

My dad served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II. Other than a few anecdotes like how he found a way to scrounge more than his ship’s meager allotment of beef when a supply party went ashore, he barely spoke of his wartime experiences. Now that he is long dead, all I have from that period of his life are his officer’s dress uniform, a pair of shoulder bars showing his rank, a tiny handful of photos and an ash tray some Chief Petty Officer carved out of a shell casing after Guadalcanal.

Phil survived the war, went to law school on the GI Bill, and when he aged and needed medical help, the Veterans Administration hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota turned him away. Despite Congress’ promise to veterans in the Forties that “if you fight for your country, we’ll take care of your medical needs for life,” Ronald Reagan changed VA regulations and broke the promise. Phil would relate easily to the problems veterans of Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan face nearly every day with the VA.

So, to Phil and the millions of others who served in war time, it is truly a day to remember all of you. Thanks.

Now For Something Completely Different ...

Sarah Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, told the AP that Palin spent “the weekend going through her clothing” to determine what belongs to the Republican Party after it spent $150,000-plus on a wardrobe for the vice presidential nominee (and possible Senate candidate? -Ed).

“She was just frantically … trying to sort stuff out,” Heath reports. “That’s the problem, you know, the kids lose underwear and everything has to be accounted for.”

Uhm, has anyone bothered to ask why contributors to the Republican Party were buying underwear for Palin’s children?

Meanwhile, in Wasilla, hometown backers put aside their disappointment over her unsuccessful Veep bid to focus on really important issues. Jessica Steele, for one, can’t wait to see what Sarah Palin does next – with her hair.

“That’s something I want to talk to her about: What’s our vision for her hair?” says Steele, proprietor of the Beehive Beauty Shop and keeper of the governor’s Bee Gee’s era up-do since 2002.

This just about sums up Sarah’s depth and that of her campaign and friends. ‘Nuff said.

Is Henry Paulson Channelling Chairman Mao?

One of Chairman Mao Tse Tung’s “sayings” immortalized in his Little Red Book deals with stealth in politics and war. “Make a noise in the east,” the Great Helmsman wrote, “and strike in the west.”

On Monday afternoon, I realised that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is channelling Chairman Mao. While everyone on the Hill and around America was focusing attention on the election and bank rescue plan – a noise in the east – on Sept. 30, Paulson struck in the west by quietly giving banks a $140-billion windfall by issuing new regulations under an arcane provision of a seldom used 1980’s-era tax law involving corporate mergers.

According to The Washington Post, the change to Section 382 – a provision that limits a kind of tax shelter arising in corporate mergers – came after a two-decade effort by conservative economists and Republican administration officials to eliminate or overhaul the law, which is so little-known that even influential tax experts sometimes draw a blank at its mention. Until the financial meltdown, bank lobbyists told the Post, its opponents thought it would be nearly impossible to revamp the section because it would look like a corporate giveaway.

It would look like a giveaway because that’s exactly what Paulson intends it to be, and Goldman Sachs best friend in Washington pulled a fast one on Congress and the American people while everybody was looking the other way.

If people called Bill Clinton “Slick Willy,” this must make Henry Paulson a 21st century Wily Coyote. He’s like Willy Sutton, the once-famous bank robber: Sutton said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is” and Paulson robs taxpayers for the same reason.

Muck And Mire

Listen to Treasury’s rationale: Spokesman Andrew DeSouza says Paulson has the legal authority as part of his power to interpret the tax code and provide legal guidance to companies. He described the Sept. 30 notice, which allows some banks to keep more money by lowering their taxes, as a way to help financial institutions during a time of economic crisis.

Apparently, Paulson doesn’t think that Seven Hundred Billion Dollars is enough of a helping hand to get clever, greedy bankers with their voracious appetite for grabbing someone else’s cash out of their own muck and mire.

Even more egregious, noted tax lawyers and other experts around the country say Paulson’s gimmick isn’t even legal.

"Did the Treasury Dept. have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, told the Post’s Amit Paley. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."

Adds Candace A. Ridgway, a tax partner at the law firm Jones Day, "It was a shock to the tax law community. It was one of those things where it pops up on your screen and your jaw drops.

"I've been in tax law for 20 years and I've never seen anything like this," Ridgway asserts in an interview with Paley.

Today, I spoke briefly with 10 US tax lawyers I know well in New York, Washington, Chicago and Minneapolis. All said Treasury has no legal authority to unilaterally change the meaning of Sect. 382; at least two of the 10 were aghast Paulson would try pulling such a stunt in the waning days of an administration already blamed for being too cozy with Wall St. and causing the financial crisis.

Now What?

Here’s the rub.

If either Treasury repeals its own regulation or Congress does it for Paulson, there’s a serious risk that more than a few of the recent bank mergers – many engineered by Treasury, the Fed or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to prevent weak banks from collapsing – will unravel. The tax benefit Paulson created is likely to be one of the driving forces behind a healthy bank’s willingness to take over a sick sister; in some cases, the acquiring bank might well have its entire, potential exposure covered by tax breaks generated by the deal.

About the best thing would be for Congress – preferably the lame duck session that convenes shortly or at least the new one in January – to turn back Paulson’s slight-of-hand trick without toppling existing merger deals. No one would gain by a sudden rash of unexpected bank failures, and the ensuing losses would put the FDIC at risk.

Still, if anyone needs proof at this late date of the deceitful behavior of Henry Paulson and the rest of the Bush gang, they need look no further than the Sept. 30 regulations for Sect. 382. Someone better lock the cash register now, before the door slams into their backside as they leave office Jan. 20, 2009.

Dear Red States ...

Pete, one of my far-flung correspondents, passed along this bit of wit that is making the rounds of the blogosphere. I post it in case you haven't seen it.

Dear Red States:

We've decided: We're leaving.

We intend to form our own country and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, this includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania and all the Northeast states. You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.

We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation – especially to the people of the new country of New California.

We get stem cell research and the best beaches; you get textbooks saying dinosaurs walked the earth 8,000 years ago. We get the Statue of Liberty; you get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft; you get WorldCom. We get Harvard; you get Ole' Miss. We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs; you get Alabama. We get Jon Stewart; you get Pat Buchanan. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than states in the Christian Coalition's power base, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we want all of our citizens back from Iraq. Right now. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We wish you success in Iraq but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of the fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the fresh fruit, 95% of quality wines, 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, most of the low-sulphur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

On the other hand, the Red States will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans and their projected health care costs, 92% of all mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We also get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you, and hope you don’t totally ruin the Grand Canyon with the uranium mining Dubya is set to allow.

It will be interesting to see the society you create since 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale; 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing war, the death penalty or gun laws; 44% say that evolution is only a theory; 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11; and 61% of you believe you have higher morals then we do.

Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.

Peace,
The Blue States

January Can't Come Soon Enough

One sunny day in late January, 2009 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd been sitting on a park bench next to the statue of Andrew Jackson. He approached a US Marine standing guard and said, "I would like to go in and meet with President Bush."

The Marine looked at the man and replied, "Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here."

The old man said, "Okay" and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, "I would like to go in and meet with President Bush."

Again, the Marine told the man, "Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here."

The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached the White House gate and spoke to the very same Marine, saying, "I would like to go in and meet with President Bush."

The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, "Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I've told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don't you understand?"

The old man looked at the Marine and said, "Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it."

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted and said, "Yes Sir! See you tomorrow, Sir."

Conservatives Wallow In Denial

Not surprisingly, red meat conservatives are wallowing in denial, now that the shock of Tuesday night has worn off. Basically, the arguments run along one of two or three lines: Obama tricked people, Obama stole the election or that despite the size and scope of the win across counties and states, he must abandon the liberal or progressive wing of the Democratic party and govern from the center.

Speaking yesterday on MSNBC’s Hardball, Michele Bernard intoned that “Obama will have to govern from the center because that’s where America is.”

Oh, no it isn’t, girl.

Then Neil Stevens, writing at Red State, insists, “Democrats are going to claim that Obama's margin of victory over John McCain was a large, overwhelming repudiation of the Republican party, and that it was possibly even a historical turning point of partisan political realignment. There's just one problem with that theory: It's not true.”

Sorry, Neil, but it is true.

Even David Brooks, appearing on the PBS NewsHour last night, stated firmly that “Obama will have to fight off the left-wing of his party to govern more from the center.”

Got it wrong, again, David.

Thursday morning, at his Conscience of a Liberal blog in The New York Times, Paul Krugman thoughtfully provided a county-by-county map of the United States showing which counties voted more heavily Democratic in 2008 than in 2004, and those counties voting more Republican this time around than in the last election. Much of the nation has a decidedly blue tint.

Sorry, Michelle; my condolences, Neil; heartfelt sympathies; David, look again. The fact is that the map clearly indicates a major leftward shift straight across the country, even in states McCain won. Only in eastern Oklahoma, a large swath of Arkansas, southern Louisiana (now heavily white in post-Katrina New Orleans) and Tennessee did more people cast Republican votes than in 2004.

And yet the right persists.

Victor Davis Hanson of the National Review grandly announces, “Like the young emperor Augustus, Obama may well have sensed that a country eager for change was still a largely traditional and centrist society — as this election’s relatively close popular vote reflected.”

A close popular vote? The map aside, Obama received well over 63.2-million votes, more than any presidential candidate in American history, beating McCain by nearly eight million votes – or the equvilent of about 12.5 Alaska’s.

Nevertheless, right wing blogger Kevin Walker wants to remind people that, “I just hope those few correct-minded people in Congress (Note: He means the remaining Republicans) will fight tooth and nail to Chairman O and his cohorts' policies that will only hurt America.”

Walker doesn’t say which of Obama’s policies will hurt America: Perhaps universal health care, which the vast majority of the country says it supports – including big business? Maybe ending Wall St. shenanigans that sent the US and the world spinning into a deep recession? How about getting out of Iraq, another winner with 80% of Americans who see the war as a tragic error? Will a more equitable tax code hurt America, with the rich actually paying their fair share? Walker leaves out the specifics.

Meanwhile, a far right, moon batty blogger who goes by the name of Moonbattery, is quoted on Huffington Post as writing, “This is a day of celebration for everyone hostile to America and the principles of individual liberty for which it stands.”

Excuse me, Moonbeam, but George Bush and Dick Cheney tore individual liberties to absolute scraps of paper during their two terms so the Bill of Rights only barely resembles what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Even when it comes to the economy, conservatives remain in a state of denial. In describing what is happening now in the US, Manchester Union-Leader columnist Kathleen Parker writes today, “Granted, not everyone got to play Monopoly, but our hardships are relatively benign.”

Tell that to everyone who lost their job, their home, their health insurance and their hope for a better life.

The election made a number of things clear about 21st century America, prime among them that the Republican Party’s laisser-faire attitude about business and regulation, about social issues and the role of religion in public life, and what governing for all of the people means all need a massive re-think.

Barack Obama will be everybody’s president but, based on what happened in this election, the last thing he needs to do is worry about governing from the center. The American center has moved left.

The End Of The Beginning

Like many other people last night, at precisely 11PM when the polls closed in California, Oregon and Washington, and Keith Olbermann called the election, I started to cry. Steady, solid, weeping that kept coming in waves.

Then I glanced at the screen where the MSNBC director was flipping from one celebration to another and saw many others crying: Blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, young, old, men, women, all over the country. A series of individual shots that, together, redefined the United States of America last night.

There was a student at Spellman College in Atlanta who collapsed in tears and was being comforted by her friends.

Then Oprah was leaning on the shoulder of the man in front of her as she cried uncontrollably, Jesse Jackson standing directly behind her with two rivers flowing freely down his face.

A quick shot of a nursing home day room where elderly white men and woman, some in wheelchairs, one man wearing an American Legion cap, some cheering and some wiping their eyes with tissues.

Cut to a sports bar in Georgia where white and black faces kissed each other, and hugged.

And always back to Grant Park in Chicago. The roar of the poor, the tired, the huddled masses yearning to be free lifting their voices and their smiles and their hands in relief and jubilation and ecstacy and exhaustion.

I thought of my mother, who died in 1996. She had my sister and me sit in front of the television when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial before an endless sea of people who only had hope for a different tomorrow. Their - our - tomorrow finally came at 11PM Eastern time last night. I remembered how she wanted to go to that rally but Dad talked her out of it because it might become "dangerous." It turned out, the only dangerous thing was Dr. King's ideas.

John McCain came on screen in Pheonix to concede, giving the best speech of his campaign and silencing the yahoo's in the crowd who booed when he mentioned Barack Obama. Then back to the studio where someone was reading a White House transcript of Bush's congratulatory call to Obama where he told the President-elect to "go out and enjoy yourself." Only George W. Bush would hand the presidency of a country he came close to ruining to someone by saying Obama should "enjoy himself." It was akin to urging people to shop after 9/11.

Finally, there was Obama himself. He gave a better, more encompassing vicory speech than most inaugural addresses over the past 30 years.

Someone, it might have been Chris Mathews, said he looked "exhausted." He may have been that after 20 months of campaigning but, to me, he looked somber. Written all over Obama's face was the reality of the burden he suddenly bore, not just for himself and the country but the entire world. Even after his speech, when Joe Biden and his family and the throng of relatives and well-wishers crowded around him, he couldn't shake the look of a man who suddenly realises how alone he is.

I remember what Jack Kennedy said the first morning he was president and walked into the Oval Office. Surrounded by long-time aides and advisors, he sat in the chair behind the Lincoln desk that he requested be brought out from the Smithsonian Institute, looked up and asked, "Now what the hell do we do?"

Last night, Obama's face showed that he knew full well "what the hell do we do." But he's not alone. He has tens of millions of people around the country, and around the world, there to help. Our work has just begun.

Final Projection: Obama 349, McCain 189 Electoral Votes

Throughout the campaign, the most-reliable polling information came consistently from Nate Silver's website, fivethirtyeight.com.

Starting from his adoration of baseball statistics - a love I happen to share with him, by the way - Silver created a thoroughly incomphrensible maze of logrithems, regressions and who-knows-what-else to run all of the polls through his computer regressions, statistical analyses and simulations. He didn't just take information from one poll or a few of them, he took data from all of the polls, adjusting for past accuracy, internal polling bias and other abberant behavior.

Throughout the campaign, Silver's numbers have been dead-eye accurate.

The final projection from fivethirtyeight.com: Obama 349 electoral votes, McCain 189.

Here's the last election report Silver filed before returns begin showing up in five hours.

It's Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, Election Day in America. The last polls have straggled in, and show little sign of mercy for John McCain. Barack Obama appears poised for a decisive electoral victory.

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

We also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.

This race appears to have stabilized as of about the time of the second debate in Nashville, Tennessee on October 8th. Since that time, Obama has maintained a national lead of between 6 and 8 points, with little discernible momentum for either candidate. Just as noteworthy is the fact that the number of undecided voters is now very small, representing not much more than 2-3 percent of the electorate. Undecided voters who committed over the past several weeks appear to have broken roughly equally between the two candidates.

Our model forecasts a small third-party vote of between 1 and 2 points total; it is not likely to be a decisive factor in this election except perhaps in Montana, where Ron Paul is on the ballot and may garner 4-5 percent of the vote.

Any forecasting system is only as good as its inputs, and so if the polls are systematically wrong, our projection is subject to error as well. Nevertheless, even as we account for other cycles in which the polling numbers materially missed the national popular vote margin (such as in 1980), a McCain win appears highly unlikely. It is also possible, of course, that the polls are shy in Obama's direction rather than McCain's, in which case a double-digit win is possible.

Nor does McCain appear to have much chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote; in fact, our model thinks that Obama is slightly more likely to do so. McCain diverted many of his resources to Pennsylvania, a state where he narrowed Obama's margins somewhat, but which our model concludes that Obama is now virtually certain to win. This may have allowed Obama to consolidate his margins in other battleground states, particularly Western states like Colorado and Nevada to which McCain has devoted little recent attention.

Thank you for placing your trust in FiveThirtyEight.com over the course of the past several months. We hope that you will join us both on the website and on HDNet tonight, where I'll be providing election coverage for Dan Rather's team. FiveThirtyEight intends to continue to apply our unique approach to politics after the election, and we hope to have several announcements about our future plans in the coming days and weeks.

Thank you, Nate!

Quote Of The Day

"If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government." – Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic

"Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so that Obama could run. Obama's running so that we all can fly. I can't wait until November 5 and I'm going to say 'Hello, Brother President'." – JZee, rapper

"Ok guys, let's go home. It will be fun to see how the story ends." – Barack Obama to reporters on his campaign plane last night en route to Chicago.

The Last Les MisBarack Video

Here's the final Les MisBarack video. If you don't have tears at the end, you are not human!

I Tremble For My Country

The American author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams once wrote, "The eyes of the future are watching us and they are praying that we learn to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with clasped hands that we might act with restraint, leaving room for the life that is destined to come."

Described as a "visionary" by the Utne Reader, Williams’ prayerful hope sums up how I feel this morning, the day before what will be the most-critical election of our time. Maybe any time since Lincoln was elected in 1860. Yet I also tremble for my country as it stands on the eve of electing its 44th president.

I tremble because we stare numbly at a world in crisis due largely to America’s catastrophic wars of choice and “in your face” foreign policy.

I tremble because we live terrified in an economy melting faster than a snow cone in August thanks to the unbridled greed and “grab all you can before someone else gets any” philosophy nurtured by a president who has no moral compass.

I tremble because as we shiver in the cold, early days of winter, a cold, shivering chill runs down our spines when we hear John McCain and Sarah Palin throw smears and platitudes like red meat to starving animals instead of discussing real issues like 11% of the country not working when unemployment claims are added to the number of people who’ve become discouraged and stopped looking for a job, or that 18% of American children go hungry every day, or one-sixth of the country is praying and hoping they and their kids don’t get sick or injured because they have no insurance.

I tremble because we’ve endured eight years of seeing America’s honor in the world torn to shreds, the Constitutional rights that protected us for 225 years from government abuse of power and authority systematically stripped and pillaged, the virgin American ideal of equal justice and equal rights and equal opportunity and equal protection raped repeatedly by an ideologically-driven Supreme Court where one Republican-appointed justice is angry he was born black, a second is a mental midget and a third accepts the far right notion that those who have it are worth more under the law than anyone who doesn’t.

I tremble because if We the People of the United States of America have another election stolen out from under us there will be hell to pay at home and around the world. One of the most laconic women I know told me last night that if somehow McCain confounds the reams of polls and wins, there will be rioting in the streets and “I’ll be out there throwing bricks myself.” Ironically, a deposition is being taken today in Ohio of the man who may have been responsible for the illegal, computerized vote switching and disappearing votes in the Buckeye State in the infamous Ken Blackwell 2004 Presidential Election Vote Switcheroo.

I tremble for my country because there is not enough Loraizapam™ in the world to calm me down if Obama loses. I should be celebrating my birthday today but instead I sit worried, fearful, frightened and trembling.

538 And Rasmussen: Obama Still Has Healthy Lead

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll once again shows Barack Obama with 51% of the vote while John McCain is five points back at 46%. This is the 38th straight day that Obama's support has stayed between 50% and 52%.

In the Electoral College projections, Rasmussen shows Obama leading 260 to 160. When states that are leaning in one way or the other are included, Obama leads 313 to 160. A total of 270 Electoral College votes are needed for victory.

At Nate Silver’s five thirtyeight.com, Obama's position became somewhat stronger since its Sunday afternoon update. Silver has him with a 5.8 point lead in the national popular vote, and winning the election 96.3 percent of the time. Earlier, those figures were 5.4 and 93.7, respectively.

Obama's win percentage ticked upward for a couple of reasons, Silver maintains.

Firstly, he's gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before.

Second, Silver reports, McCain's clock has run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.

Moreover, there are very few true undecideds left.

After accounting for a third-party vote which looks as though it will come in at an aggregate of 2%, Silver shows only about 2.7% of voters left to allocate between the two major-party candidates. He predicts that even if John McCain were to win 70% of the remaining undecideds, it would only be worth a net of about a point for him. Frankly, McCain's winning scenarios mainly involve the polls having been wrong in the first place – because of a Bradley Effect or something else. It is unlikely that the polls will "tighten" substantially further – especially when Obama already has over 50% of the vote.

A couple of quick notes from Silver on yesterday’s individual state and national polling:

• He says people shouldn't worry too much about the SurveyUSA result in Minnesota which shows Obama just 3 points ahead. SurveyUSA's polling in Minnesota has been “very weird” all year; they've never shown Obama with larger than a 6 point lead in their likely voter model and had McCain ahead in the state as recently as October 1st. SurveyUSA does not have a Republican lean in general but, in Minnesota, it has consistently had a huge one.

• A couple of the national polls have started to predict how undecided voters will behave and allocate them between the two major-party candidates. Silver uses versions of these surveys before any such allocations are made as he doesn’t believe a pollster's job is to be in the prediction business.

I Couldn’t Wait

– Guest post by Dick Price of LAProgressive.com

I didn’t really mean to do it. I usually have more self-control. Something just came over me. I couldn’t restrain myself. Please forgive me.

I voted Friday.

I don’t have an excuse. I’ll be in town on Election Day and had planned to vote then like I always do. I’ve even taken off work Monday and Tuesday, making myself available to pitch in where needed, which would give me plenty of time to vote Tuesday, no matter how long the lines.

And, ordinarily, I like voting at our local polling place here in Mount Washington; I like bumping into our neighbors and silently congratulating each other in this bluer-than-blue neighborhood for striking our blow for what we hope will be freedom and justice. Oftentimes, I take my 14-year-old daughter along, making it a family affair that I hope will rub off on her.

But after a long, antsy day at the office in Los Alamitos, I found myself behind the wheel Friday afternoon, headed back through the Orange Curtain, to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s Office in Norwalk. It’s probably no more than 10 miles as the crow flies, but I was confined to surface streets, which were crowded with moms driving their kids to Halloween parties. As usual, I took a couple wrong turns to make the trip more of an adventure than necessary, then had to circle to the large parking lot several times to find an open spot.

Once I processed in at the Registrars, I spent the better part of an hour in a huge, makeshift tent with hundreds of my fellow Angelenos—some who had spent hours there already—until my number was finally called and I could mark my ballot for Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and for our new friends Cynthia Loo and Lori-Ann Jones for LA Superior Court, for Xavier Becerra for Congress and Kevin de Leon for the Assembly, and against Prop 8.

And I’ve got to tell you, damn, did it feel good! Damn, damn, damn!

An Essential Sea Change

Since you’re reading this, I don’t have to tell you how important this election is.

Aren’t we all heartsick at the way the Bush-Cheney Administration has combined wrong-headed incompetence with wrong-hearted bellicosity to bring our country to its knees on so many fronts? Now, doesn’t the prospect of another Republican administration, led by an ill-tempered John McCain and an ill-informed Sarah Palin, leave a pit in all our stomachs?

America would survive a McCain-Palin Administration—Americans are resilient folk—but it would be another four years of grinding through an administration that simply doesn’t represent policies that reflect my views or those of most people I know.

On the other hand, Barack Obama’s performance through this endless campaign, the measured way he has addressed the economic and military crises that have arisen, the galvanizing way he has inspired millions of Americans as no one has for decades, the growing sense that this man and his Vice President, Joe Biden, would put together an administration that would get something done that we all want done—well, it vindicates every hope Sharon and I expressed before the California primary.

And, obviously, we’re not alone.

Even in states that have seemed to have gone over entirely to the Dark Side, the Obama-Biden ticket has a shot just three days out:

• The New York Times reports that in Colorado “close to 1.5 million votes, or about 46 percent of the registered total, are already in the can, cast and waiting to be counted.”
• In Georgia, the Washington Post reports that a “record-breaking 2 million people cast early ballots in the U.S. state of Georgia, an indication of high enthusiasm over Tuesday’s presidential election that could help Democratic candidate Barack Obama.”
• And in North Carolina, where I lived for a couple years as kid, The Nation reports that Obama has a chance: “Obama’s North Carolina campaign, undergirded by 1,700 volunteers, 40 offices and close to 400 paid staffers (McCain has 30 offices but only 30 paid staff), has outregistered Republicans five to one in the state this year and drawn even in the polls heading into the campaign’s last weeks. In the first week of early voting, in mid-October, almost three times as many Democrats as Republicans were casting ballots in a record turnout; while African-Americans are only 22 percent of the state’s population, almost 40 percent of early voters were black.”

Long lines are reported in virtually every state that has established early voting. Not all the absentee and early voters will go for Obama and Biden, of course, but early returns are looking good for the Democratic ticket, darned good. These early returns, the long lines, the masses of Obama volunteers, and the mountains of small donations his campaign has amassed month after month tell us that something is clearly afoot.

America is on the move.

Bringing More of Us In The Tent

The crowd in the tent at Norwalk looked a lot like Los Angeles: African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Whites in roughly equal measure. Working class folk and young professionals. Young and old, but a lot of the young. More than a few who struggled with English.

I don’t suppose everyone there cast a vote for Obama. There was no electioneering, in the tent or outside. No one wore an inappropriate button or shirt — my Obama-Biden button was in my pocket and my “No on 8” T-shirt under my regular shirt. Still, there were enough winks and nods and high-signs to say that the Democratic ticket was having a good day up and down the line.

I ran into our young friend Francisco Cendejas, who needed to vote early because he had decided to help get out the vote for Manuel Perez’s California Assembly race in Indio and Palm Springs and also pick up a ballot for his girlfriend Ana Mascarenas, who had returned to her home state of New Mexico to help with a Congressional race there. It was nice to see a friendly face in what was a friendly crowd despite the long waits, close quarters, and a bullhorn that rattled your teeth.

This election isn’t about race anymore than it’s about income redistribution. But an Obama Administration is going to make a big difference in race and class relations in this country. As our friend, Anthony Asadullah Samad wrote recently, America is finally letting one of the disenfranchised “drive the car.” ust the fact that a black man will be our President and a black woman our First Lady, two people who grew up in the straightened circumstances many Black Americans know, will send the clear signal to all the disenfranchised across America that they’re more fully inside the tent with the rest of us.

And that will be a good thing.

So let’s all make sure that good thing comes to pass so we can spend the next four years a dream, not a nightmare.

Along with his wife Sharon, Dick Price edits a daily e-news and opinion magazine at www.LAProgressive.com

How Obama Will Do It

– Guest post by Denis Campbell of VadimusPost.com

If you think this campaign was about tons of money for slick television advertising, you’re wrong. The money helped Obama take his message into additional ‘red’ states, but this election was about getting to know the voter – the customer, if you will – and giving them a voice and a say. Yes, Obama built a classic door-to-door retail unprecedented political machine but he made the election about us. No-drama Obama is only part of the story.

The wizard behind the curtains is soft-spoken and determined David Plouffe, 41, Obama’s campaign manager. Said strategist David Axelrod, “David Plouffe has done the most magnificent job of managing a campaign that I’ve seen in my life of watching presidential politics. To start something like this from scratch and build what we have built was a truly remarkable thing.”

These are the seven deadly virtues of Obama-Plouffe and the decidedly disciplined and unsexy way in which they did it:

1. The Pharaoh’s Already Dead

Invert the pyramid. In this election, ground-level organizing and excitement trumped traditional thinking. Plouffe turned the organization upside down and decentralized everything: He put the campaign in the hands of incredibly loyal, door-to-door, face-to-face organizers in the highest of high-touch ways. Half of the campaign money raised went to community organizing and was indeed a triumph of average voters over high powered lobbyist political machines.

The Clinton and McCain campaigns brought in “the usual suspects” and relied on models from the last three elections. They wheeled out 90’s-era lobbyists and strategists from past campaigns such as Rick Davis and Mark Penn, architect of Hillary’s “3AM ad” who stilled is owed $7-million by the campaign.

This is how campaigns are run. McCain was in Alexandria, Virginia next to Washington, they could all be important, lunch at The Palm on the campaign’s nickel, opine on national TV, sit together in high level HQ meetings, dictate strategy and, as we saw, in-fight and destroy the campaign from the inside-out.

Obama put his top people and surrogates out in the field. Now with 4,000 paid staffers and millions of volunteers, I got calls from US phone banks here in the UK despite having voted six weeks ago via absentee ballot. Plouffe had the good sense to give them more than they could possibly use or need, get out of the way and then let volunteers and field staff do their thing as opposed to issuing HQ fiats and edicts and deflating their enthusiasm.

The election was always about them.

2. Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers

In a traditional campaign, you follow a prescribed timetable and calendar which breaks at different times over your opponent. Well, there never was a sacred cow in the Obama campaign. They went against conventional wisdom at every turn: Obama never got the memo.

As a result, his campaign made sure everyone knew this was not the 1992, ’96, ’00 or ’04 election. This was to be the first YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, Twitter election. The Internet was where it would be won or lost. So he set out to:

• Attract and excite those who had never voted,
• Energize young people on college campuses, and
• Lure back those who felt so disenfranchised by the seeming theft of the last two elections that they’d given up.

The problem was the Democratic Party, a group that had won only three Presidential elections in the last 40 years. Democratic voters are like Rolling Stones fans. They are so busy getting ready for the concert they forget to vote. I’ve loved the Stones for decades, been to most of the concerts and I’ve never purchased an album. Point made?

Obama got them enthused and kept them disciplined. He warned of complacency until the last poll closed, even producing a brilliant ad showing a guy celebrating and falling off his bike before crossing the finish line, crashing because he took his hands off the handlebars and the second-place rider – with a McCain paste-on face – passing him at the line. Obama and his team always warned of celebrating too early despite the encouraging news.

Obama spoke to enormous rallies and got them to vote by using his relentless follow-up machine.

3. Lies, Damned Lies And Statistics

Pollsters can ask any question in any way to get the result they want. What they did not count on was the wonkish Nate Silver, head of über statistical firm and website www.fivethirtyeight.com.

The gold of 538 is it represents the number of electoral votes up for grabs; the first to obtain 270 state-by-state is the winner. All states except Nebraska and Maine are winner take all contests with Nebraska and Maine apportioning electoral votes by Congressional district.

If you followed the daily tracking polls as a barometer of what was happening, you got only half the story because those pollsters did not factor in new voters, those brought back by Obama or cell phone-only households (15% of the US ). The “Likely Voter Model” was based on those who had voted in the last two Presidential elections.

Silver grew up following baseball stats so he developed mathematical formulae and algorithms based on all factors before issuing his polls and predictions. As expected, he gets it right more often than the vaunted television network news desks and traditional pollsters such as Gallup, Zogby and Rasmussen. Team Obama knew this and their internals always showed a strong advantage; this was why they had an 18-state battleground strategy which included many red states.

4. Obama’s Ground Game

There was an 80%+ total turnout, the largest since 1960 and one third of the vote was cast in the weeks before Election Day. The subplot to this is the enormous registration effort in key battleground states. This is referred to as Obama’s Ground Game (OGG). While the Republicans, Sarah Palin in particular, joked about “what is it a community organizer does?” they got schooled and gamed.

The OGG was registering voters methodically and consistently all throughout the summer and on into September. Using sophisticated data-tracking tools such as Geographic Information Systems, used by Bill Gates’ foundation to target areas of greatest need for food and vaccinations, Obama’s field offices and millions of volunteers kept reaching out to the newly registered. Indiana, a traditional Republican red state had four million registered voters in the 2004 election; the OGG machine registered 400,000 new Democrats this time around. Pennsylvania had five million voters in 2004; the OGG registered 500,000 new Democrats.

Up and down the battleground state map, new voters and volunteers for change was the order of the day.

5. Money, Money, Money

By enthusing the base and reaching out to people who never before voted, the Obama campaign generated $650-million dollars or $86 per person. More importantly, he brought 3.2-million people onboard via his website.

His standard “ask” was $5 or $10 per person, knowing that once he motivated you to contribute a small amount, do something you had likely not previously done, the battle was won. He could e-mail and have your neighbors call you. You were more likely to listen to your neighbor than a candidate or a pundit.

Polio was defeated by raising $2 rolls of dime coins for President Roosevelt; it later became the “The March of Dimes.” Everyone could empty their pocket. Folks thought this a mad way to raise campaign cash – until it worked and raised more than ever before.

6. Play The Game On The Other Guy’s Half Of The Field

Obama’s campaign forced McCain to defend and protect his turf against Obama’s overwhelming push. Hope for a mistake is how McCain had to play this election game. Make him play defense all of the time.

McCain had quite a bit of money yet played the game throughout the month of October in his own end of the field and was forced to spend money defending even his home state of Arizona, Georgia which, normally, is very Republican and North Dakota, a state George Bush won by 27 points in 2004. Obama said from the beginning he wanted to end partisan Red vs. Blue politics and build a center from where the best ideas could be grown and implemented.

7. The Internet Is Not A Series Of Tubes

Soon-to-be former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once called the internet “a series of tubes.” The Obama Internet was a fund raising, organizing and data mining juggernaut.

• Fund Raising - Team Obama picked up where Howard Dean left off. The DNC Chair raised $6 million dollars over the Internet for his 2000 presidential primary election campaign. Everyone wanted to know how to do that. Last month Obama shattered the record he himself had set the previous month ($150 million dollars raised in September vs. $66 million in August) and long after this election ends we will learn he raised another $100 million dollars or so for October and the first three days of November. That’s ¾ of a billion dollars or more raised for one candidate.
• Organizing - If you registered at www.barackobama.com there was a wealth of Internet tools to use, making it possible to download everything from position papers to brochures and desktop wallpaper. You could find hints on how to organize debate watching parties, find other supporters in your area and suggested talking points. You knew where phone banks would be held and could even organize car pools to help elderly or handicapped voters get to the polls online. You could also report attempts at voter suppression by the other side and other bad actors. You had access to the campaign and they treated you as the real reason for the campaign.
• Data Mining - The real gold for the campaign was mining and manipulating the real-time databases behind the website that made their data mining effort unprecedented. They used a variety of tools to reach out and ask for help because they knew where and how to find you.

They also used their social networking tools from sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to collect friends and surrogates all working for one thing. Through data mining, they also helped individuals find like-minded people around the globe. The breadth of their technological reach was breathtaking and it grew and merged over time into an unstoppable juggernaut.

I live in the UK and registered at my mother’s address in the USA. With two clicks of my mouse, I knew of every like-minded person in my neighborhood, county, state and region. I found out where debate-watching house parties were to be held and how door-to-door campaigning efforts were organized. I knew of union and private phone banking efforts every day for the last five months and could join in if I chose or someone called me to make sure I was invited.

My mother took 17 calls – sorry, Ma – by different volunteers saying thanks for the support and if she or I had any questions. Even she was impressed.

By the way, she is still waiting for her first McCain phone call.

This is high touch customer embracing action and once you commit to it, you literally become the Biblical mustard seed that moves a mountain.

* * * * *

This is a generational change and wave election. As revolutionary as it was, it never lost site of the fact that we needed to first connect with and learn from each other before casting our vote.

Obama made it easier and acceptable again for us to talk with each other over a cup of coffee at the back fence. David Plouffe and Barack Obama have revolutionized the way political organizing is done.

Obama knew he had to shatter the red state-blue state paradigm and expand the base; otherwise he could not govern and lead.

Obama brought confidence, change and hope as his message. Everyone worked hard and pulled together in the same direction. No one ever took anything for granted, especially based on the past, and this is what will win it. It also helped that people really understood the consequences of the Bush years and despite a $10-trillion deficit, there was absolutely nothing to show for it.

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King’s proclaimed, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

We are almost there yet there is much work to do.

Denis Campbell is editor-in-chief of www.VadimusPost.com.

New CD From ‘Billionaires For Bush’

Claiming that their checks to the Obama campaign were refused and the lobbyists rebuffed, the organization called Billionaires For Bush is fighting back. They ripped out every page from their old playbook, Fear and Voting in America, even going so far back as to plot another hostage crisis in Iran.

Now, with most of their eggs in John McCain's hand-basket, they fear the worst. So the group is shoring up its tax shelters and intend to ride this one out, but are sending this last dispatch before they may have to shove off for awhile.

The group has recorded a new CD at http://thebillionaires.org/stay-the-course-cd called Stay The Course which includes titles “We’re Spying On You,” “The Hurricane,” and “The K Street Tango” among 12 others. It’s available on-line for free.

One Final, Desperate Smear

With 72 hours remaining in the campaign, the McCain brain trust finally recognizes that its effort to link Barack Obama to "unrepentant domestic terrorist" Bill Ayers is having as much of an impact on voters as the “experience” argument.

So it is trying trotting out a new smear, another milestone on McCain's low road to the White House.

It is blasting Obama for consorting with unrepentant domestic Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. Never mind that he is a distinguished professor of Arab studies at Columbia, Khalidi once taught at the University of Chicago where he and Obama knew each other. Taking one last stab at instilling shadowy associations between Obama and Arabs in the minds of uninformed voters, the McCain team is slandering a thoughtful and respectable man.

Appearing on CNN Friday, McCain’s shameless and utterly unrepentant flack Michael Goldfarb chirped, "Barack Obama has a long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric." Challenging Goldfarb, anchor Rick Sanchez asked, "Can you name one other person besides Khalidi who he hangs around with who is anti-Semitic?" Goldfarb couldn't, but the damage had been done – not to Obama, but to Khalidi, whose anti-Semitism had been presented as a matter of accepted fact.

Neither A Bigot Or Anti-Jewish

I don't know Khalidi personally though I've read his recent book Resurrecting Empire. But I know that there is nothing in his record to justify smearing him as a bigot. While the McCain campaign has presented him as a "PLO spokesman" – and it wouldn't be a crime if he were – in fact, Khalidi was simply an outside adviser to the Palestinian delegation at negotiations convened by Republican secretary of state James Baker during Bush The Elder's administration.

Apparently, McCain is now so hostile to diplomacy that participating in American-sponsored talks is deemed anti-American.

Yes, Khalidi is a supporter of Palestinian rights and a serious critic of Israel and of American policy in the Middle East, and he is well to the left of Obama. But he condemns violence, criticised Yasser Arafat's corruption and cronyism, and has consistently acknowledged Jewish suffering. Fair-minded friends of Israel have praised his writing. New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman, hardly a Jew-hater, described Under Siege, Khalidi's book about PLO decision-making during the 1982 Lebanon war, as "extremely valuable" and "generally objective, lucid and incisive".

Professor Khalidi is on the board of sponsors of the Palestine-Israel Journal, a publication founded by prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists to encourage dialogue between the two sides. By the degraded standards of McCain and Palin, McCain himself could be branded as an enemy of the Jews. As has been widely reported, under McCain's leadership the International Republican Institute gave nearly a half-million dollars to a Palestinian research center Khalidi co-founded.

Yet McCain's attacks on Khalidi are categorically different than his attacks on Ayers.

Condemning Violence

The Ayers attacks were unfair to Obama, who was not particularly close to the man and never gave a hint of condoning Ayers’ youthful violence. Ayers did shameful things so his public excoriation was not entirely undeserved. This is not true of Khalidi. He is guilty of nothing. The dangerous implications of McCain's assaults on him stretch beyond this election, suggesting that friendship with prominent Arabs is grounds for suspicion and thus dangerous for ambitious politicians – unless the Arabs belong to the Saudi royal family.

Given our leader’s failure to even try understanding Arab grievances, no wonder the Bush administration made catastrophic foreign policy blunders in the region that could take decades to repair. Obama's engagement with a prominent, moderate Palestinian intellectual should be a point in his favor. In any rational society, it would be.

By trying to turn their acquaintance into evidence of subversion, McCain does more than disgrace himself even more than he already has. His reckless rhetoric threatens to push legitimate criticism of Israeli and American policy even further outside the bounds of acceptable political discussion, making straight talk on the Middle East ever more elusive.

Palin Gets Punked

The image of the humorless Canadian just got whacked apart like a piñata.

A pair of Montreal radio comedians, one of whom pretended to be Nicholas Sarkozy, managed to get Palin to believe she was speaking with the French president for nearly five minutes yesterday. Among other things, she laughs and agrees to go helicopter hunting with Sarkozy when he said he likes to kill “small animals.” Palin also gushes over Carla Bruni, Sarkozy’s model-singer wife.



When the radio comic tells her they have a lot in common because he can see Belgium from his house, Palin agrees noting the analogy between the American relationship with Russia and the French relationship with Belgium.

The “Special Relationship” Frays: British Gov’t Investigating CIA Officers For Torture

So much for the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. If it is not in complete tatters, it is fraying badly this morning.

The British Attorney General says he will investigate allegations that a British resident arrested by the US in Pakistan before being “rended” to Morocco, shipped to the black hell hole prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and is now at Guantanamo Bay was brutally tortured after being arrested and questioned by American intelligence officers beginning in 2002.

According to The Independent, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith wants the attorney general, Baroness Scotland, to bring criminal proceedings against American CIA officers said to be responsible for the rendition and abuse of Binyam Mohamed when he was held in prisons in Morocco and Afghanistan as a result of US rendition.

This follows sharp criticism of US prosecutors by British judges who read secret evidence of torture committed against Mohamed, including allegations his torturers used a razor blade to cut his penis repeatedly. The Attorney General's investigation is expected to include allegations that MI5 colluded in Mohamed's rendition. Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian national and British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, where he was questioned by an MI5 officer before being handed over to the Americans.

On Tuesday, Government lawyers wrote to the judges hearing Mohamed's case against the UK government in the High Court. In the letter they said "the question of possible criminal wrongdoing to which these proceedings has given rise has been referred by the Home Secretary to the Attorney general for consideration as an independent minister of justice." Baroness Scotland has been sent secret witness statements given to the court and public interest immunity certificates for the proceedings.

Mohamed, 30, accuses MI5 agents of lying about what they knew of CIA plans to transfer him to a prison in North Africa, where he claims he was subjected to horrendous torture to extort a confession. Last night, his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, said, "This is a welcome recognition that the CIA cannot just go rendering British residents to secret torture chambers without consequences, and British agents cannot take part in US crimes without facing the music."

The US State Dept. had no comment this morning on the British claims, a spokeswoman telling me, “we do not comment on matters before foreign courts.” A spokesman for the CIA did not return several phone calls.

McCain’s Dirty Hands

That the CIA was able to do this is partly the responsibility of John McCain. Once a strong campaigner against the US using torture, he caved in to the Bush administration by allowing an ammendment to an anti-torture bill he sponsored and shepherded through Congress that exempted the CIA from the law’s key provisions.

Human rights groups have sharply criticised the British government for allowing CIA “torture flights” to refuel in England as well as fly through its airspace. A special European Parliament investigation condemned the US for its policy of “extraordinary rendition” where individuals suspected of participating in terrorist activities are flown to third countries that use torture as a matter of routine when questioning political prisoners.

“If John McCain had held firm in barring torture by any US government agency, Mr. Mohammed would have avoided being tortured whicforced him to confess to crimes he did not commit,” a spokesman for Human Rights Watch in Britain told me this morning.

“As a result of capitulating to White House demands,” she added, “McCain’s dirty hands are all over this case.”

Another Bush Lie

Torture under any circumstances violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention which both the US and Great Britain have signed. At the time of Mohammad’s rendition, George Bush lied repeatedly when he stated at news conferences between 2004 and 2006 “the US does not torture. Period.”

In August, two judges ruled allegations of torture were at least arguable in Mohammad’s case and stated that MI5 information relating to Mohamed was "not only necessary but essential for his defence.” The judges have read statements and interviews with Mohamed between July 28 and 31, 2004, when he says he was forced to confess to terrorism. The judges said, "This was after a period of over two-and-a-half years of incommunicado detention during which Binyam Mohamed … was tortured."

He was first held in Pakistan in 2002, where a British agent interrogated him; he was then sent to Morocco by the CIA and allegedly tortured for 18 months. He was rendered to the secret "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan, where his torture is alleged to have continued. Since September 2004, Mohammad has languished at Guantanamo Bay.

If the British Attorney General finds that the charges of torture are true – which will require merely going through MI5 and MI6 files – then criminal warrants could be issued against Americans who were involved in Mohammad’s torture, rendition and custody. It is doubtful that the Bush Administration would extradite the officers but it could be one of the first diplomatic issues facing the new president in January. If McCain is somehow elected, the officers involved wouldn’t be sent for trial in London but their travelling days and vacations will be limited to the United States.

Another reason to vote for Barack Obama.